The "Queen Extravaganza" tour, produced by Queen's Brian May and Roger Taylor, has announced its initial 2013 dates. The tour -- which does not feature the band -- kicks off on January 11th in Tarrytown, New York and eventually winds down on February 2nd in Halifax, Nova Scotia. During the run, the show will play a five-night run in Quebec City, Quebec.

Taylor, who played a crucial role in picking the creative and production team along with the performers, said in the tour's press release, "We did the first 10 years of our career with just the four of us, no additions, you know the technology wasn't there. We were relying on stripped down adrenalized versions of our songs and our own personalities. But with this band, we continue to push all the musical boundaries with technology that was not available to the four of us originally. This band is a powerhouse of talent. To hear our songs performed by them gives fans a chance to hear them (our songs) now as they could have done then and perhaps technically, even better!!"

Taylor went on to say about the deluxe multimedia show, which had several rounds of contestants vying for a position in the band: "We're very proud of our canon of music and we'd like that to be represented in an absolutely brilliant way. And not as just playing the hits . . . we want to see a really scintillating show, put together and played almost perfectly."

The 90-minute show features the Queen Extravaganza band performs 22 Queen classics -- including "Bohemian Rhapsody," "Another One Bites the Dust," "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," "Under Pressure," "We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions," "A Kind Of Magic," "Radio Ga Ga," "Somebody To Love," "You're My Best Friend," and "Killer Queen," among other classics and deep album cuts.

Since frontman Freddie Mercury's 1991 death from AIDS, Queen has performed with several other frontmen -- most notably, touring the world with Bad Company lead singer Paul Rodgers and most recently performing with American Idol finalist Adam Lambert singing lead.

The rock world was stunned in 1992 when George Michael led the band at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, when he joined the band for a near definitive on performance of "Somebody To Love" at London's Wembley Stadium. We asked Roger Taylor on why Queen passed on exploring such an obviously bankable scenario: "We never really wanted to do that route. We had a lot of offers, etc. etc. We could've done it, let's face it. But I think it would've been a little sad, I think. We wouldn't have felt -- I don't think we would've continued long doing it, y'know? We wanted to do the thing with Paul because he was always quality in our view and and it was Queen plus Paul Rodgers, y'know? It was never him pretending to be the lead singer of Queen, so that seemed to work. We would have never done, say, the Journey route, or whatever. It was never really our way of doing things."